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Reader joshtops shares a Bloomberg report: Google isn't the only Silicon Valley employer being accused of hostility to white men. Yahoo and Tata Consultancy Services were already fighting discrimination lawsuits brought by white men before Google engineer James Damore ignited a firestorm -- and got himself fired -- with an internal memo criticizing the company's diversity efforts and claiming women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers. The Yahoo case began last year when two men sued, claiming they'd been unfairly fired after managers allegedly manipulated performance evaluations to favor women. They claim Marissa Mayer approved the review process and was involved in their terminations, and last month a judge ordered the former chief executive be deposed. TCS, meanwhile, is fighting three men who claim the Mumbai-based firm discriminates against non-Indians at its U.S. offices.

Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Opera Max -- the free data-saving and VPN-like tool from the team behind the Opera web browser -- is being killed off. The app has been removed from Google Play with immediate effect, and there will be no more updates. Opera is not really giving a reason for the sudden decision other that the fact that Opera Max had "a substantially different value proposition than our browser products."

An anonymous reader shares a report (condensed for space and clarity): For crate-diggers of all stripes, the internet is awesome for one reason: The crate never ends. There's always something new to find online, because people keep creating new things to throw into that crate. But that crate has a hole at the bottom. Stuff is falling out just as quickly, and pieces of history that would stick around in meatspace disappear in an instant online. So as a result, there aren't a lot of websites from 1995 that made it through to the present day. Gopher sites? Odds are low. Text files? Perhaps. The endless pace of linkrot has left books about the internet in a curious limbo -- they're dead trees about the dead-tree killer, after all. [...] Recently, I bought a book -- a reference book, the kind that you can still pick up at Barnes and Noble today. The book, titled Free $tuff From the Internet (Coriolis Group Books, 1994), promises to help you find free content online. And, crucially, it focuses less on the web, which was still quite young, than on many of the alternative protocols of the era. This book links to FTP sites, telnet servers, and Gopher destinations, and I've tried many of them in an effort to figure out whether something, anything in this book works in the present day. These FTP servers were often based at universities which have a vested interest in keeping information online for a long-term period -- think the University of North Carolina, or Kansas State University. But despite this, I could not get most of these servers to load -- they were long ago murdered by the World Wide Web.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chris Lattner, a legend in the world of Apple software, has joined another rival of the iPhone maker: Alphabet's Google, where he will work on artificial intelligence. Lattner announced the news on Twitter on Monday, saying he will start next week. His arrival at Mountain View, California-based Google comes after a brief stint as head of the automated driving program at Tesla, which he left in June. Lattner made a name for himself during a decade-plus career at Apple, where he created the popular programming language Swift. Lattner said he is joining Google Brain, the search giant's research unit. There he will work on a different software language: TensorFlow, Google's system designed to simplify the programming steps for AI, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Google has cancelled the domain registration for The Daily Stormer, the company confirmed to news outlet BusinessInsider. After GoDaddy kicked the neo-Nazi website off its service on Monday, a "whois" search for the domain had noted that the website had moved its domain registrar to Google. In a statement, Google said, "We are cancelling Daily Stormer's registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service." Last week, The Daily Stormer posted an offensive article about Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old legal assistant, who was killed by a car that 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. drove into a group of protestors at the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday. A message purportedly posted by hackers appeared on the Daily Stormer a few hours ago, The Guardian reported. Anonymous hacker group has taken credit for "hacking" the website, according to the message posted on the website, which adds that the editing rights of the website are now in the hands of Anonymous. It remains unclear, however, whether the site has actually been hacked.

MojoKid writes: AMD has finally launched its Radeon RX Vega series of graphics cards today, based on the company's next generation Vega 10 GPU architecture. There are three base card specs announced, though there are four cards total, with a Limited Edition air-cooled card as well. Three of the cards have 64 NGCs (Next Generation Compute Units) with 4096 stream processors, while Radeon RX Vega 56 is comprised of 56 NCGs with 3584 SPs. Base clocks range from roughly 1150 to 1400MHz, with boost clocks from 1470MHz to 1670MHz or so. All cards come with 8GB of HBM2 and sport 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth, except for Vega 56, which has a bit less, at 410GB/s. They are power-hungry as well, ranging from the 345 Watt liquid-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, to the 295 Watt air-cooled RX Vega 64 and 210 Watt Radeon RX Vega 56. Performance-wise, Radeon RX Vega 64 is neck-and-neck with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, winning some and losing some, with flashes of strength in DirectX 12-based games and benchmarks. Vega 64 also maintains generally better minimum frame rates versus GTX 1080. Radeon RX Vega 56 is a more credible midrange threat that handily out-performs a GeForce GTX 1070 across the board. In DX12 gaming, Radeon RX Vega 56 stretches its lead over the similarly-priced GTX 1070. Both cards, however, are more power-hungry, louder and run hotter than NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 1080. Radeon RX Vega 64 cards will retail for $499 (Liquid Cooled cards at $699), while Radeon RX Vega 56 drops in at $399. All cards should be available at retail starting today.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Essential, the new phone startup from Android founder Andy Rubin, is now a unicorn, according to reports from over the weekend. If you're not up to date on the parlance of Silicon Valley, a unicorn is a company that's valued at over $1 billion dollars, which is no small feat in today's market. This title is even more impressive, given that Essential has yet to ship a single device to consumers. According to a report, Foxconn's FIH Mobile filing for a $3 million investment in Essential for around 0.25 percent of the fledgling phone company revealed Essential's new unicorn status with a valuation of around $1.2 billion.

Researchers at the security firm Lookout have identified a family of malicious Android apps, referred to as SonicSpy. From a report: Experts say the malware author modified a version of the official Telegram app, injected the spyware code, rebranded it, and uploaded the modified app on the Play Store. In total, the crook uploaded the app three times on the Play Store under the names Soniac, Hulk Messenger, and Troy Chat. Only Soniac was active on Google's app store when researchers first spotted the spyware, as the other two apps were already taken down, most likely by the developer himself. At the time of writing, Lookout says they identified over 1,000 variations of this new spyware called SonicSpy, which they believe to be a new version of an older Android spyware named SpyNote.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: Monday, the well-known security researcher who became famous after helping to stop the destructive WannaCry ransomware outbreak pleaded "not guilty" to creating software that would later become banking malware. Marcus Hutchins -- better known by his online nickname MalwareTech -- was arrested in early August in Las Vegas after the hacking conference Def Con. The US government accuses Hutchins of writing software in 2014 that would later become the banking malware Kronos. After getting out on bail and traveling to Milwaukee, he stood in front a judge on Monday for his arraignment. Prosecutors also allege he helped a still unknown co-defendant market and sell Kronos. Hutchins's lawyer Brian Klein declared in a packed courtroom in Milwaukee that Hutchins was "not guilty" of six charges related to the alleged creation and distribution of malware. Hutchins will be allowed to travel to Los Angeles, where he will live while he awaits trial. He will also be represented by Marcia Hoffman, formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Under the terms of his release, Hutchins will be tracked by GPS but will be allowed full internet access so he can continue to work as a security researcher; the only restriction is he will no longer be allowed to access the WannaCry "sinkhole" he used to stop the outbreak of ransomware.

An anonymous reader writes: The invention of the atomic clock fundamentally altered the way that time is measured and kept. The clock helped redefine the duration of a single second, and its groundbreaking accuracy contributed to technologies we rely on today, including cellphones and GPS receivers. Building on the accomplishments of previous researchers, Harold Lyons and his colleagues at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), in Washington, D.C., began working in 1947 on developing an atomic clock and demonstrated it to the public two years later. Its design was based on atomic physics. The clock kept time by tracking the microwave signals that electrons in atoms emit when they change energy levels. This month the atomic clock received an IEEE Milestone. Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.

Reader Big Hairy Ian writes: Web hosting company GoDaddy has given a US neo-Nazi site 24 hours to find another provider after it disparaged a woman who died in protests in Virginia. The Daily Stormer published a piece denigrating Heather Heyer, who was killed on Saturday after a car rammed into a crowd protesting at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. GoDaddy had faced calls to remove the white supremacist site as a result. The web host said the Daily Stormer had violated its terms of service. "We informed the Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy said in a statement on Twitter. Previously, some web users had called on GoDaddy to remove the site -- including women's rights campaigner Amy Siskind. Violence broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, after white supremacists organised a controversial far-right march called "Unite the Right".

Reader schwit1 writes: Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth -- two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica. The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes -- with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland. This is in addition to 47 already known about and eruption would melt more ice in region affected by climate change, the report added. Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa's volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world. And the activity of this range could have worrying consequences, they have warned. "If one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilise west Antarctica's ice sheets," said glacier expert Robert Bingham, one of the paper's authors. "Anything that causes the melting of ice -- which an eruption certainly would -- is likely to speed up the flow of ice into the sea.

An anonymous reader quotes 4K.com:
Samsung Electronics has announced that its premium Smart TV content service, TV Plus, is now available for users of Samsung Smart TVs in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom... Owners of eligible Samsung Smart TVs with 4K / HDR capabilities in the above-mentioned European countries now have direct access to premium 4K UHD HDR content offered by Samsung, in partnership with Rakuten TV, and can find their favorite shows using the TV Plus straightforward interface... The expansion comes at what could be considered a strategically well timed moment in the European market, given that 4K TV sales in the huge continental market are steadily growing year by year and are expected to rise to over 17 million 4K TV units shipped by the end of 2017. Meanwhile, TV Plus content has become a success in Southeast Asia since its launch, where 70% of Smart TV users in Korea are watching TV PLUS channels, and 41% of Smart TV users in Vietnam are using TV PLUS.

“Mrs S” works for a large software vendor. This vendor has a tendency to quickly increase staffing to hit arbitrary release targets, and thus relies heavily on contractors. Since they’re usually doing this during a time crunch, these contractors may have a… dubious skill set.

They also don’t care. There is no documentation, no tests, and no explanation. They are just paid tho write the code, not maintain it. They’ll be on another contract before long, so it’s some other schmuck’s problem.

Which is why “Mrs S” found this code, which takes a version number, as a pair of integers, and converts them to a string, but still couldn’t tell you why it does any of the things that it does.

On Saturday author/blogger Cory Doctorow launched a new barrage of criticism towards Wells Fargo:
It's been a whole day since we learned about another example of systematic, widespread fraud by America's largest bank Wells Fargo (ripping off small merchants with credit card fees), so it's definitely time to learn about another one: scamming mortgage borrowers out of $43/month for an unrequested and pointless "home warranty service" from American Home Shield, a billion-dollar scam-factory that considers you a customer if you throw away its junk-mail instead of ticking the "no" box and sending it back.
$43/month gets you pretty much nothing: people who tried to actually use their AHS insurance found it impossible to get them to actually do anything in exchange for this money. Here's a quick Wells Fargo fraud scorecard: stealing thousand of cars with fraudulent repos; defrauding mortgage borrowers; blackballing whistelblowers; creating 2,000,000+ fraudulent accounts, and stealing millions with fraudulent fees and penalties.
Life Pro Tip: if you don't like banks, join a credit union.

Paul Thurrott reveals a new internal Microsoft memo from corporate vice president Panos Panay which acknowledges "some quality issues" with their launch of Surface Book and Surface Pro 4. But an anonymous reader quotes a darker story from Thurrott.com:
Multiple senior Microsoft officials told me at the time that the issues were all Intel's fault, and that the microprocessor giant had delivered its buggiest-ever product in the "Skylake" generation chipsets. Microsoft, first out of the gate with Skylake chips, thus got caught up by this unreliability, leading to a falling out with Intel... Since then, however, another trusted source at Microsoft has provided me with a different take on this story. Microsoft, I'm told, fabricated the story about Intel being at fault.
The real problem was Surface-specific custom drivers and settings that the Microsoft hardware team cooked up. The Skylake fiasco came to a head internally when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and asked the firm, then the world's biggest maker of PCs, how it was dealing with the Skylake reliability issues. Lenovo was confused. No one was having any issues, he was told. I assume this led to some interesting conversations between the members of the Microsoft senior leadership team. But the net result was that Microsoft had to push out some existing designs quickly to get ahead of the reliability issues.
The Surface Book ultimately had a 17% return rate after its late-2015 launch, while the Surface Pro 4's return rate was 16%. So though Microsoft later pushed to improve subsequent releases, Panay's memo claims that "These improvements were unfortunately not reflected in the results of this [Consumer Reports] survey." The memo also reiterates high customer-satisfaction metrics, which Thurrott says "supports the contention that I made two days ago... Customers who spend more on premium products tend to be more satisfied even when they are unreliable because they need to justify their own decision-making process."
"He also suggests that what Consumer Reports calls a 'failure' is perhaps overly-broad and that some incidents -- like a frozen screen or unresponsive touch -- are not 'failures' but are rather just minor incidents that are easily rectified by the user."

"Mozilla is prepping a new version of Firefox in an effort to rally in the race for browser supremacy," writes CNET's Matt Elliott, who decided to test drive a new nightly build of Firefox 57 which "promises fast speeds and a new look." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Firefox 57 has added a screenshot button in the top-right corner... It highlights different elements on a page as you mouse over them, or you can just click-and-drag the old-school way to take a screenshot of a portion of a page. Screenshots are saved within Firefox. Click the scissors button and then click the little My Shots window to open a new tab of all of your saved screenshots. From here you can download them or share them... The bookmark and Pocket buttons have been moved from the right of the URL bar to inside it, but the Page Actions button is new. Click it and you'll get a small menu to Copy URL, Email Link and Send to Device. The Page Actions menu also has bookmark and Pocket buttons, which seems redundant at first but then I realized you can remove those items from the URL bar by right-clicking them. You can't remove the new, triple-dot Page Actions button...
As with any prerelease software, Firefox Nightly 57 is meant for developers and will likely exhibit strange and unstable behavior from time to time. Also, there is no guarantee that the final release will look like what you see in the current version of Nightly. For example, I have read reports that the search box next to Firefox's URL bar may be on the chopping block. It's part of the design of the current Nightly build but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets dropped between now and November since most web users have grown accustomed to entering their search queries right in the URL bar. Just as you can with the current version of Firefox, however, you can customize which elements are displayed at the top of Firefox Nightly 57, including the search box.

Law professor Ryan Calo -- sometimes called a robot-law scholar -- hosted the first White House workshop on AI policy, and has organized AI workshops for the National Science Foundation (as well as the Department of Homeland Security and the National Academy of Sciences). Now an anonymous reader shares a new 30-page essay where Calo "explains what policymakers should be worried about with respect to artificial intelligence. Includes a takedown of doomsayers like Musk and Gates." Professor Calo summarizes his sense of the current consensus on many issues, including the dangers of an existential threat from superintelligent AI:
Claims of a pending AI apocalypse come almost exclusively from the ranks of individuals such as Musk, Hawking, and Bostrom who possess no formal training in the field... A number of prominent voices in artificial intelligence have convincingly challenged Superintelligence's thesis along several lines. First, they argue that there is simply no path toward machine intelligence that rivals our own across all contexts or domains... even if we were able eventually to create a superintelligence, there is no reason to believe it would be bent on world domination, unless this were for some reason programmed into the system. As Yann LeCun, deep learning pioneer and head of AI at Facebook colorfully puts it, computers don't have testosterone.... At best, investment in the study of AI's existential threat diverts millions of dollars (and billions of neurons) away from research on serious questions... "The problem is not that artificial intelligence will get too smart and take over the world," computer scientist Pedro Domingos writes, "the problem is that it's too stupid and already has."
A footnote also finds a paradox in the arguments of Nick Bostrom, who has warned of that dangers superintelligent AI -- but also of the possibility that we're living in a computer simulation. "If AI kills everyone in the future, then we cannot be living in a computer simulation created by our decedents. And if we are living in a computer simulation created by our decedents, then AI didn't kill everyone. I think it a fair deduction that Professor Bostrom is wrong about something."

An anonymous reader quotes Portland TV station KGW:
Amazon issued a widespread recall for solar eclipse glasses early Saturday morning, one week before the August 21 eclipse. That move stunned some sellers who say their glasses are verified safe.... "We recommend that you DO NOT use this product to view the sun or the eclipse," Amazon wrote... "Out of an abundance of caution, we have proactively reached out to customers and provided refunds for eclipse glasses that may not comply with industry standards." At least a dozen KGW viewers said they received recall notices from Amazon Saturday... KGW viewer Heather Andersen said she bought two separate sets of solar glasses and learned both were not verified. "I give up," she tweeted...
Manish Panjwani's Los Angeles-based astronomy product business, AgenaAstro, has sold three times its average monthly revenue in the past month. Ninety-five percent is related to the solar eclipse... Panjwani's eclipse glasses come from two NASA-approved sellers: Thousand Oaks Optical in Arizona and Baader Planetarium in Germany. He said he provided documentation to Amazon proving the products' authenticity weeks ago, with no response from Amazon. On Saturday morning, he woke up to 100 emails from customers after Amazon issued a recall for his products. "People have some of the best glasses in the world in their hands right now and they don't believe in that product," he said. "They're out there looking for something inferior." Panjwani said Amazon is temporarily retaining some of his profits because of the recall. He also has almost 5,000 glasses at an Amazon warehouse, which customers can no longer purchase. "That's just sitting there. I cannot sell it and I cannot get it back in time for the eclipse," he said.

Why haven't we heard from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? wisebabo writes:
In the Science Daily article "Where is everybody? The Implications of Cosmic Silence," the retired astrophysicist Daniel Whitmire explains that using the principle of mediocracy (a statistical notion that says, in the absence of more data, that your one data point is likely to be "average"), that not only are we the first intelligent life on earth but that we will likely be the only (and thus the last) intelligent life on this planet... Unfortunately that isn't the worst of it.
Coupled with the "Great Silence", it implies that the reason we haven't heard from anyone is that intelligent life, when it happens anywhere else in the universe, doesn't last and when it does it flames out quickly and takes the biosphere with it (preventing any other intelligent life from reappearing. Sorry dolphins!). While this is depressing in a very deep sense both cosmically (no Star Trek/Wars/Valerian universes filled with alien civilizations) and locally (we're going to wipe ourselves out, and soon) it is perhaps understandable given our current progress towards reproducing the conditions of the greatest extinction event in earth's history.
That last link (reprinting a New York Times opinion piece) cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia." But if we're not headed to the same inexorable doom, that raises an inevitable follow-up question.
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?